More byMichele

1. Columbia Pictures turned it down… because Mel Brooks insisted it be filmed in black and white. Wait a minute. Didn’t you read the story about Mel Brooks? You did not? If you did, you would already know this. Shame, shame. Um, back to the fact… The film ended up being made by 20th Century Fox.

2. The laboratory equipment used in the movie is from the original 1931 film Frankenstein. Mel Brooks says that Kenneth Strickfaden, the man who created the props, still had them in his garage. When they found out, Strickfaden dusted them off, plugged them in, and they all worked. “I asked [20th Century] Fox if we could rent them, and give him a decent sum of money,” says Brooks.

3. Brooks’ favorite time during the making of the movie was lunch. It’s not because he was hungry. It’s because he would sit around with Gene Wilder, Teri Garr, Madeline Kahn, Peter Boyle, and Marty Feldman, and they would all share stories about their lives. He remembers Kahn talking about how she originally wanted to be an opera singer and then someone thought she was funny and gave her a comedic role. She then became a comic actress instead. Oh, to have been a fly on that wall…

4. Mel Brooks sometimes didn’t direct, but rather, let the actors and actresses have space and do what came naturally. Brooks says he told them to “Play it like a play. I’m not going to chop it up. I’m not going to say cut. You’re going to talk for 10 minutes, and I’m not going to interfere. Just keep doing it.” Some fun scenes that resulted: when Garr remarks to Wilder that he hasn’t touched his food, and he begins to jam his hands into it saying, “There. There. I’ve touched it!” Another is when Feldman says, “I’ll never forget what my father said to me at times like this,” and then he just pauses and doesn’t say anything. It wasn’t until Wilder asked, “What did he say?” that Feldman responds. “He wasn’t supposed to get that line,” says Brooks, speaking of Feldman. “But he had the guts to just say nothing.”

5. While Mel Brooks wasn’t in the movie, he did provide voices for it. Brooks did the voices for the werewolf, a cat getting hit by a dart, and Victor Frankenstein. “But I did [them] for real,” says Brooks. “I didn’t try to make them funny. I tried to mimic the guys that originally did Frankenstein.”

Michele Wojciechowski is the award-winning author of the humor book Next Time I Move, They’ll Carry Me Out in a Box, writer of the award-winning humor column, Wojo’s World®, and a not-yet award-winning stand-up comic. Like Mel Brooks, she never panders to the “lowest common denominator” audience. Check out her website at www.wojosworld.com.